In this final summary interview with Prof. Dr. Suzanne Narciss, we review all our learning about failure over the last few months. There is much we can do to encourage our students to learn from errors, including interactive formative assessment and feedback strategies, prompting reflection and adaptive strategies for dealing with errors and using other people’s errors. As teachers we need to help students overcome their fear of failure by creating a positive error climate and supporting students to develop a more positive error mindset. But this is an area that is challenging to research and we still have much to learn.

More than one in 10 children ‘almost always’ or ‘often’ fear failure. But where do they learn this from?

This fear can often pass from parents to children. Parental communication about failures and setbacks plays a critical role in shaping a child's perception of mistakes. In her research Dr Elizabeth Peterson found that:

• Clear action plans without discussion of collaborative resources increased children's fear of making mistakes.

• When mothers acknowledged their child's emotions and discussed collaborative problem-solving, there was a notable decrease in the child's fear of mistakes.

• Many mothers minimally acknowledged or dismissed their child's emotions (40%), rarely discussed action plans (55%), or collaborative resources (79%).

Effective parental communication involving emotional acknowledgment and collaborative problem-solving can help reduce children's fear of making mistakes. In this interview we discuss the consequences of this research for the classroom and how we as teachers can have positive conversations with our students about failure.

You can find Elizabeth’s paper here:

Peterson, E. R., Sharma, T., Bird, A., Henderson, A. M. E., Ramgopal, V., Reese, E., & Morton, S. M. B. (2024). How mothers talk to their children about failure, mistakes and setbacks is related to their children's fear of failure. British Journal of Educational Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12685

https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjep.12685

Today's discussion focuses on our perceptions, as teachers, of failure. When as a teacher we watch our lessons back on film where do we see failure and how do we respond? Reflecting on our own relationship with failure could be important in informing our practice in the classroom. For example our personal relationship with failure will inform how we respond to student failure and this in turn could hinder or facilitate student growth and learning. In this episode Dr Amber Simpson and Dr Alice Anderson discuss their paper 'Identifying and shifting educators' failure pedagogical mindsets through reflective practices'.

The details and link to the paper is here:

Simpson A, Anderson A, Goeke M, Caruana D, Maltese AV. Identifying and shifting educators' failure pedagogical mindsets through reflective practices. Br J Educ Psychol. 2023 Dec 23. doi: 10.1111/bjep.12658. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 38140824.

Informalscience.org

Failure in Making: https://sites.google.com/binghamton.edu/failureinmaking/home?pli=1